What Google Trends Teaches Us About When to Trust Data

It is really easy for people to trust data. Perhaps too easy. A 2018 Stanford University study showed people are 70% more likely to trust statements with a number in it than one without. Even more alarming, nearly 60% of participants believed a fake headline that contained a statistic vs. only 40% who believed the same headline without the statistic. And here is the real kicker: None of that last two paragraphs, save for the first two sentences, were true. There was no Stanford study that I know of, and I made up those numbers. That hyperlink is actually a link to the infamous 1982 “band on the field” Cal/Stanford game. While I’m not that sorry for tricking you, it illustrates the point: Numbers (and people) can definitely misrepresent the truth. In the content marketing world, we see a lot of misleading numbers attempting to build trust with audiences. Even scarier, a lot of content producers don’t even realize they are doing it. Not sure what I mean? I will show you with my favorite example: Google Trends. Three Basic Rules for (Honest) Data Analysis If you are unfamiliar, Google Trends is an incredible tool that allows you to look up the relative search volume of anything. For instance, I wanted to know when “Old Town Road” started ruining my life, so I pulled up a chart of interest over the last year. Pretty intuitive, right? According to this chart, the hit reached fever pitch around mid-April 2019. For context,… [Read full story]